To say someone paints en plein air, a French term for “in the open air,” is to conjure up an artist seated at an easel outdoors, under an umbrella, depicting specific landscape features more or less faithfully. This held true for much of the 19th century, when the practice originated, but today’s artists have expanded the concept. The range of contemporary approaches to plein air painting can be seen in the exhibition Seven on Site, on view until the end of June at the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Seven on Site features an informal association of landscape painters who live and paint across the country. The seven—Martha Armstrong (Hatfield, MA); Sasha Chermayeff (Hudson Valley); Jane Culp (California); Judy Koon (Chicago); Ro Lohin (Long Island); Lynette Lombard (Galesburg, IL); and Megan Williamson (Chicago)—joined forces to show together out of a shared commitment to painting on site. Their unconventional works emphasize expressive form and brushwork over changes in light effects, weather, and time of day, the more traditional concerns of plein air painting. These seven artists may paint some or most or all of a landscape outdoors, but none produces a direct transcription of nature. While grounded in reality, each interprets distinctively.

As its name suggests, “Seven on Site,” the exhibit at the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton through June 30, shows the works of seven artists, all who painted outside within view of the scenes captured on canvas. The pieces encompass a wide range of territory, both in terms of the terrain they cover and their compositional attributes.

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Lombard’s “Lake Chautauqua” employs thick strokes of paint to capture the lushness of a windblown tree, its foliage like a mass of luxurious green hair. Dramatic clouds, tinged by the colors of a setting sun, scud across a bright blue sky. The heavily applied paint gives the scene an extravagant sensuality that hints at a crisp breeze and dramatic temperature changes caused by the passing clouds.

Lynette Lombard’s new work focuses on expansive views of the Spanish and Midwestern landscape. Each painting presents multiple points of view while maintaining sensations of rising, falling and twisting terrain. Idiosyncratic geometries and chromatic light build a weighted, visceral experience of place. Lombard incorporates Max Beckmann’s stacked spaces with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s weighted, pulsating colour relationships. Together these influences allow her colour and drawing structure to make land masses compress and squeeze against each other while water and sky stretch into open expanses.

All land is charged with history. Currently, the land Lombard is most engaged in painting is land at the crossroads- the mouth of the Mediterranean- a land historically inhabited by Jews, Arabs and Christians, which is now either abandoned scrub grass with gigantic boulders or dotted with irrigation ponds that fuel new citrus orchards carved into the desert. A land in transition.

In contrast, the Midwestern landscapes are painted from inside looking out into an urban space- where moments of nature are squeezed between tarmac and concrete. These paintings of a tree, cars and snow banks at times, eliminate the foreground so, you fall into a destabilizing space. Lombard finds plastic, rhythmic organic forms within pictorial tensions.

As a landscape painter, Lombard works directly from the motif. Her work evokes a primary sense of confrontation and connection. The mediated digital world collapses space and Lombard’s images are a form of activism because she brings us back into the experiential. She is interested in a slow unfolding as an image opens up and allows for a space of contemplation. In that space sensations and memories merge, connections and meanings are revealed. It is where the fragile and sometimes disturbing become actual and tangible and conjure a spirit of place.

Lynette Lombard received her MFA from Yale University, her B.A. Honours from Goldsmiths’ College of Art, University of London and attended the New York Studio School for two years. Lombard is an Associate Professor of Art at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. She has had 15 solo shows and over 40 group shows nationally and internationally.

She has received several research grants from Knox College, a Mellon Grant to Berlin, the Philip Green Wright-Lombard Award for Distinguished Teaching and was a finalist for the Gottlieb prize. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Mojacar, Spain, the Lakeview Museum, Peoria, IL, The Painting Center (curated by Ro Lohin) NY, the Midwest Paint Group, Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, The New York Studio School (curated by Karen Wilkin, Dore Ashton and Bill Jensen),The Paul Mellon Arts Center, CT and Trinity Christian College, Chicago.

Ms. Lombard has also taught at the Chautauqua Institute School of Art, the Ox-Bow School of Art for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a visiting artist at the International School in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy. Her work is in the Sir Issac Hayward Collection, Hayward Gallery, London, the Collum Davis Library Bradley University Collection and is in several private and corporate collections.

Lance Esplund, art critic for Modern Painters, Art in America wrote “ Lombard’s collisions of color convey the activity and immediacy of the artist’s eye as it darts from motif to palette to canvas in an attempt to rein in

I paint the forces I see in nature. I work directly from the motif because the process of seeing and finding those forces- the big relationships within masses of land, sky and water- pushes me to take risks. My paintings are shaped within the triangle from me to the land to the painting. Being within the place I paint – walking the land, and enduring the relentless elements of land and weather – is essential to how I paint, and allow me to feel part of that place. It is important that the landscape is so much larger than I; I need to be engulfed and immersed. I always want my paintings to convey a visceral experience of a place, made particular through found geometries, color and light, coming together to give the painting its own reality and weight. I look to Courbet, Marsden Hartley and Frank Auerbach as painters whose paintings embrace the embodied experience of places through structuring the physical reality of paint and form.

Painting is a process of exploration and discovery. I like to find new ways of organizing spatial relationships, the sense of scale- suggested and actual -and the light of the place. I try not to name the objects I paint; I’m much more interested in the sensations evoked by my perceptions. In painting a tree, I imagine the tree as a verb rather than a noun, and work to depict a dynamic experience instead of a static object. The experience I’m after includes, but goes beyond the object, to a visually poetic evocation of leaning, tilting, almost falling, bark, branches and lichen.

It’s a meta- physical, sensate poetic evocation of a tree that I’m after. There is always a struggle between the competing demands of shaping big abstract structures and trying to make a painting convincing about the particularity of hard concrete or scrub grass on a hillside. Since I am constantly bombarded outside by so many sensations, part of my process involves working on the painting in the studio. In order to become its own reality in the world, a painting may need to be separated from its motif, and the studio does that. The studio allows me to have a dialogue with the painting itself. I make decisions that are more concise about my initial experiences in the landscape so that in the end, an image becomes real when it gets beyond description and beyond the analytic. It moves into a synthetic cohesiveness- when the parts together express the unexpected and the strange – true to something I know, and pointing to something I don’t. That’s when a painting is a jolt on the nerves.

A landscape painting, by its very nature, evolves over many moments in time. I sometimes paint several points of view in one painting- I seek to get a sense of the place and a sense that we move – all wrapped into one image. It’s true that there is a constant sense of passing time and transience when painting outside, but I like the way Adrian Stokes says that over time the substance of paint turns to stone. For example, when I paint clouds, the ephemeral moment becomes a hard and solidified mass.

All land is charged with history. Currently, the land I am most engaged in painting is land at the crossroads- the mouth of the Mediterranean- a land historically inhabited by Jews, Arabs and Christians. Now it is occupied either by abandoned scrub grass with gigantic boulders or dotted with irrigation ponds that fuel new citrus orchards carved into the desert. It is a land in transition. In contrast, my midwestern landscapes are painted from inside looking out into a semi-urban space. In these places, bits of nature are squeezed between buildings and parking lots. These paintings of a tree, cars and snow banks often eliminate the foreground. You fall into a destabilizing space.

As a woman painter I feel keenly aware of being rather vulnerable when I’m out in the landscape. Vulnerable in the sense that I could be a target for violence and vulnerable because I become immersed in painting and oblivious to certain possible dangers, but I’m not stupid. I carry a can of mace. While, this may also have been true for Cezanne, I think this additional tension adds a sense of urgency to my work, and that urgency bleeds into an acute awareness of other environmental threats to the land itself.

The Prado Museum has an outstanding collection of El Greco’s paintings. To my mind, he’s the first cubist with all those shifting planes and dynamic spaces. But what drove him to make those strange, nocturnally lit, stretched forms and spiraling spaces? I think that something beyond himself was at stake- perhaps his faith and his sense of the ineffable. Those paintings search desperately to give meaning-filled form to his experience. And that’s what we do as artists. The art that interests me has resonant form that reveals something beyond the obvious, but never abandons the physical. The challenge of landscape painting today is to make paintings that are as urgent in our time – that can reform our vision of nature, and cause us to re-imagine our place in it.